volcanohunter

The Metropolitan Opera decided to stop performances in February because it was the worst patch for ticket sales. (Plus it's when singers are most likely to be sick and in need of last-minute replacements.) "The Met will shift performances from February, traditionally a period when less people attend the opera, to later in the spring, a period more appealing to audiences. Instead of concluding in mid-May, future seasons will end in mid-June." https://www.metopera.org/about/press-releases/met-opera-and-union-groups-reach-ground-breaking-agreement-to-allow-sunday-matinee-performances/ Is there any reason to think ABT would do better box office? The other day The New Yorker ran a piece about the demise of summer programming at Lincoln Center. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/28/requiem-for-mostly-mozart As FauxPas pointed it, the practice of wall-to-wall foreign visitors at the Met in July ended a long time ago. (It had been one of the best things about my childhood.) In those days Bolshoi and Kirov tours were rare, so they weren't the ones driving the touring boom. I would add that even later the Bolshoi didn't tour the United States all that frequently. It appeared in New York in 2014 and with limited forces in 2017, the final year of the Lincoln Center Festival. But The Taming of the Shrew sold poorly and Lincoln Center was forced to offer a 25% discount on tickets. The Bolshoi hadn't appeared at the Kennedy Center since 2014, and not in Los Angeles since 2012. (A few cities were planned in 2020, but COVID-19 undid that.) In other words, Americans weren't exactly dependent on the Bolshoi for a ballet fix.

Wayne McGregor rehearsing Alessandra Ferri and Federico Bonelli An intermission feature from the cinema broadcast.

Woolf Works is available on disc from Opus Arte. https://www.opusarte.com/details/OA1282D

I'll say this. A video of actor Sergey Bezrukov reciting Pushkin's "To the Slanderers of Russia" is one of the scariest things I've seen. It positively drips with loathing and belligerence. There are a lot of Russian expats in Cyprus, and there are impresarios who cater to them. (I live nearly 10,000 km away but ended up on a mailing list.) Bezrukov was supposed to bring a one-man show, but first came Covid restrictions, and then Bezrukov was barred from the EU. The presenter kept postponing and postponing, and after a few years simply stopped advertising the show.

ROH Stream has just added three ballets from an all-Ashton program broadcast in 2022: Scènes de ballet (Lamb, Muntagirov), A Month in the Country (Nuñez, Ball, O'Sullivan, Acri, Saunders, Avis) and Rhapsody (Hayward, Sambé). If you haven't signed up yet, the first 14 days are a free trial. After that it's £9.99 per month or £99.99 annually. At the moment the library includes 21 evening-length ballets (including three performances each of Giselle and The Sleeping Beauty) and 20 one-act ballets (5 narrative, 15 abstract). Plus 33 operas and extras (intermission features and public rehearsals, which for the most part were available on YouTube). https://www.roh.org.uk/stream

The theater wasn't hit, but last night the workshops of the Odesa Opera House sustained some damage from falling missle debris. https://www.facebook.com/100063485952677/posts/pfbid0K19E2HatT3ia4WVuJmKJdSVWUTpn3ybw8J9dTUCGy3c62XEm7RxiXcrZLds3cXBAl/?mibextid=CDWPTG

Baryshnikov was the exception rather than the rule. After his defection he was indisputably the biggest thing in dance. But the prototype of the male ballet dancer of the future turned out not to be Baryshnikov, but Adam Lüders.

I first saw Glinka Pas de Trois about 35 years ago--performed not by NYCB--and back then part of the issue was that the ballet was bequeathed to André Eglevsky's widow, and initially it didn't fall under the Balanchine Trust. Although the photo on the Trust website is clearly from a NYCB performance. https://www.balanchine.com/Ballet/Pas-de-Trois-(Glinka)

The Australian Ballet has posted that World Ballet Day 2023 will take place on November 1st (starting the evening of October 31st for those in the Americas). https://australianballet.com.au/blog/world-ballet-day-2023 Presumably the full schedule will appear here when the time comes: https://worldballetday.com/

The Stolyarsky Music Lyceum sustained some damage during the bombing of Odesa on July 23rd. Stolyarsky's pupils included Nathan Milstein, David Oistrakh, Boris Goldstein and Elizabeth Gilels, though the current school was built later, in 1938. https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid0KxHPtzNf8C4H775fXhjuBTrt78A8VAWQziAYJxJBSkT3SaNb3wXWBQqFoeWhnHmel&id=100068878023628&mibextid=Nif5oz Unlike the city's Transfiguration Cathedral, the school is still standing, but it has lost most of windows. https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid0294wRsNzUdVNvKzqPPikTdYH5aAyjT62nDcZdNoy3MfF3LrdrS9FKN196uJpRC132l&id=100068878023628&mibextid=Nif5oz

Tonight's performance has been canceled.

In case it hasn't been mentioned elsewhere, the Metropolian Opera is making its cinema broadcast of John Adams' Doctor Atomic available to stream free of charge until July 27. https://www.metopera.org/season/on-demand/opera/?upc=811357012130

I also don't know what English classes are like now, but I read a Shakespeare play in each year of high school and one was included in the mandatory first-year English course every student at my alma mater had to take (except for the engineers ). As it happens, Romeo and Juliet was not among them, but I understand it is a popular choice among English teachers, so there is a good chance those kids will read the play eventually.

Many years ago there was an extremely interesting documentary series about the Royal Opera House titled The House. In it an usher recounted his most unusual experience on the job and it involved a couple engaging in hanky panky in their box, and at the ROH boxes are actually separated from each other with dividing walls. Apparently, the people sitting opposite noticed something going on, and when the usher opened the door to the box, he found the offending couple on the floor in flagrante delicto, which would be nothing like taking pictures on a phone. In 2016 I attended the Proms when Pokémon Go was all the rage, and I remember people in my sight line playing it during the concerts. Perhaps a little different during a musical performance, but clearly the action on stage was less interesting to them than what was happening on their screens.

Except that these bits of crass razzle-dazzle would throw the program's artistic integrity out the window.

Honestly not sure whether to post this here or under modern dance, but the Paris Opera Ballet will livestream Carolyn Carlson's Signes, led by Hannah O'Neill and Germain Louvet, on Friday, July 14th, at 14:30 CEST/8:30 am Eastern. The cost is €14.90, but it's also included in the monthly (€9.90), annual (€99) and under-28 (€4.95/month) subscription to Paris Opera Play, which includes a free 7-day trial. For the one-time rental, the stream will be available on demand for 7 days. https://play.operadeparis.fr/en/p/signes (Happy Bastille Day 🇫🇷)

The wrinkle here, if reconstructions of Giselle are accurate, is that the entrechat six are not in the notated choreography, while the diagonal of hops is. I hate the entrechat six ("static" indeed, boring and circusy) and am firmly in the brisé camp, but they're not part of the original choreography either. I think the greatest number I've seen were 36 from Karl Paquette, and when he went four beats over the allotted music, it ejected me straight out of the drama.

I'm sorry the muffed hops were mentioned in the NYT profile. I suspect a lot of people went to Trenary's performance with a heightened interest in how the diagonal would work out. For what it's worth, I've seen Svetlana Zakharova and Evgenia Obraztsova fall off pointe during the hops, on more than one occasion. They simply continued with ballonnés. Jillian Vanstone was a wonderful Giselle who had a bad left knee and couldn't do hops for the duration, so she devised an alternate diagonal, and it didn't detract from her performance in the slightest, in no small part because of the imagination she brought to all of the choreography.

Yes, it's just NYT style to use American spelling. The UK's National Theatre becomes the National Theater on its pages. Though it did make an exception for Wheeldon's Mercurial Manoeuvres.

I have seen Ekaterina Krysanova do 360° rotations during the hops, though unlike Osipova she didn't keep her free leg moving continually. (More like attitude devant, passing through retiré and then a resumption of the diagonal.) Video evidence suggests she didn't do this in the Ratmansky production, presumably because the rotation isn't notated. I have a feeling other dancers could do it but choose not to because, frankly, it's a bit of a circus trick. I, for one, was always far more impressed by Fracci's super slow, super controlled diagonal and the serenity of her upper body as she did it, particularly when blowing a kiss in Albrecht’s direction.

The Australian Ballet will livestream Jewels on Thursday, July 6th, at 7:15 pm AEST/5:15 am Eastern. The stream costs 29 AUD, roughly 19 USD, and will be available on demand for 14 days. https://my.australianballet.com.au/17993/17996 The scheduled cast includes Sharni Spencer, Callum Linnane, Imogen Chapman, Maxim Zenin, Larissa Kiyoto-Ward, Katherine Sonnekus and Cameron Holmes in "Emeralds," Ako Kondo, Brett Chynoweth and Isobelle Dashwood in "Rubies" and Benedicte Bemet and Joseph Caley in "Diamonds." https://australianballet.com.au/performances/jewels/melbourne

I'm guessing you're referring to the fugue des wilis, which was part of Adam's original score, but which was dropped from most productions. A handful of productions include it. I've seen only three that have it, and the choreography in each case was entirely different. I also find it jarring and am happier when the retreat to Giselle’s grave leads directly into the adage.

I'm glad to know that Shevchenko's injury was not serious. Dancing Giselle three days in a row with three different partners is quite a heroic feat for Gogidze!

I didn't find anything analogous on the Mariinsky's YouTube, Telegram or Instagram, where, unlike the Bolshoi, the Mariinsky continues to post despite the site being banned in Russia.

The United Ukrainian Ballet has been posting stories of Ratmansky teaching morning class, an aspect of his work we don't often get to see. https://instagram.com/unitedukrainianballet